Could be, but then explain why the syntax of the dd command is like no other in unix, and is very similar to that of the JCL DD command. It is also worthy to note that the primary use of the DD command in early unix was to convert files to/from EBCDIC for transfer to/from IBM mainframes.

I didn't know that about the origin of rc. Back when I first encountered it in the form of .cshrc files, I struggled to interpret the meaning of the abbreviation into something familiar -- as any beginner would do with a new language. Lacking any outside guidance, I came up with "C SHell ResourCe" file. And ever since then all the RCs have been translated as "resource" in my head.

In 1960, the backronym "Mash Until No Good" was created to describe Mung, and a while after that it was revised to "Mung Until No Good"—making it one of the first recursive acronyms, and lived on as a recursive command in the editing language TECO.

When I were a lad, I visited a company that had a big ICL installation. I think my love of acronyms (and in some part, therefore, unix) began that day, when one of the operators told us that the mainframes would do a GROPE when it started up. He left us dangling for a while, but finally told us it was short for...

"General Reconnaissance of Peripheral Environment".

edit: I have vague recollections of a disk drive we could see right into, with independently activated heads per platter. I couldn't find anything that looked how I remember (so my memory is probably wrong) but I did find this! 420 Million Characters! Thats $6.49 these days...

Reading THfRO was a stand-in for any mainstream cultural reference to submarines being the machines that go "ping" to find things. Although according to wikipedia they were written (published) at roughly the same time (1983-84).

Conventional wisdom holds that /etc is etcetera (random config and other files), /usr is user (home directories), /bin is binary, /tmp is temporary, etc. They were never intended as acronyms. I've seen a more definitive reference than the two Slashdot articles I linked, but I can't track it down at the moment. Pretty sure it was somewhere on Dennis Ritchie's site at Bell Labs.

Someone modded you down for that comment, but I don't know why, so I modded it back up for the contribution. chucker has the history correct, and I've grown too used to my own environment(s). In FreeBSD 4.11, /home physically exists. Under FreeBSD 6.2, things have gone retro and /home is a symlink to /usr/home, at least under the default install.

You have to remember that many of these names have been around since the tty days. When your display is a slow, noisy printer I can understand emphasizing the directories in /etc without doing a (slower) ls -l.

When no ".d" suffix is present it's obviously safe to assume that listing is a regular file.

Thinking about this stuff makes me appreciate the -F and --color options of ls, not to mention our huge, instant-feedback, colour displays.